About the Editor

Roberto has over 25 years experience in the IT field, and has spent the last 12 years working in the intersection of open source software and business development. Roberto has taken an active interest in different open source projects and organizations, he has served on advisory boards, and helped large IT vendors, open source vendors and customers to design and deploy their open source strategies. After serving as Senior Director of Business Development at SourceForge for over 4 years, in 2016 he started a new company called Business Follows, whose mission is to is to help developers, companies and organizations to make Open Source development a key part of their business strategies. He is the editor of commercial open source blog.

A couple of days ago I happened to meet my old friend Idel Fuschini on the street, and we have been talking about things happened ten years ago or longer when working in the mobile VAS sector, when WAP was still to come.

Idel over the last ten years has been working on implementing mobile-based services using proprietary products like Volantis (nowadays pretty open source), Mobileaware, and Oracle Portal to go. More recently he started to use also open source platforms like WURFL, eventually ending to be fascinated by the open source side of software development.

What follows is not a research, neither an investigation including a quantitative evidence, but just a reportage of a programmer’s life and how open source can make a change.

Hi Roberto,
some news about my small project, one year after. Mobile community people started to follow me since I released some new features.
Simon Judge writing on his blog, helped me to raise interest in my work.

Updates in numbers:
300 dowloads per month
8 external contributions from people, both bugs’ corrections and requests for new featuresApache included my project, now listed among existing modules for Apache
4 companies wrote me to tell they have adopted my package for delivery mobile content.

At the end of the day I realized that to make a good open source piece of code, you must have a good idea and people like Roberto and Simon that help you. Thank you both for your help!